Painted Veil (Painted Veil, The)

Production and year: China, USA, 2006Genre: melodrama Screenplay: Ron Nyswaner Director: John Curran Music: Alexandre Desplat Cast: Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber Medical topic: microbiology, cholera epidemic Description: A must-see film adaptation of William Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same title. Set in the first half of the 20th century, the film tells the story of the failed marriage between a workaholic microbiologist and a wayward yet beautiful aristocrat who wants to escape her family home as soon as possible. They travel to Shanghai, where the scientist is to continue his research on bacterial strains isolated in Southeast Asia. The mismatched marriage leads to an affair on the wife’s part; upon discovering this, the husband forces her to choose between divorce (which would mean scandal and, for her, a return to the family home from which she had only just managed to escape) or an extremely risky joint trip to a region ravaged by a cholera epidemic. This epidemic becomes the film’s central theme; we see entire villages filled with dead bodies and many more sick and dying people, we learn why the epidemic does not subside (and the customs of the local inhabitants play a decisive role in this), and finally we see how the awareness of daily life face-to-face with death and the struggle for recovery changes people. And it changes them for the better.